Apple announced back in September that it would begin purging the iOS App Store, ridding it of apps that were outdated, or didn’t meet current app review guidelines. It appears they have made good on their promise, pulling somewhere around 47,300 titles from the store in October alone.
Intelligence firm Sensor Tower claims app removals jumped 238% last month. That was approximately 3.44 times the monthly average removal rate of apps from January to September of this year. (Via TechCrunch) Games were the big loser in the purge, as 28% of all apps removed resided in the Games category. The next two categories – Entertainment and Books – accounted for 8.99% and 8.96% of removed apps, respectively.
Apple warned developers back in September that they needed to update their neglected apps within the next 30 days or risk having them removed from the App Store. The Cupertino firm warned devs that they would immediately remove any apps that crash on launch, otherwise, they had 30 days to update them.
The company removed apps that “no longer function as intended, don’t follow current review guidelines, or are outdated.” They also deleted “abandoned” titles which hadn’t been given compatibility updates “for a long time.”
The purge is thought to be still continuing, as it has been estimated that nearly half of all iOS apps hadn’t been updated since May 2015, and one quarter of those hadn’t been updated since November 2013. That means Apple still has quite a bit of house cleaning to do.
